People

Matt Golder

Matt Golder is a Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. His research looks at how political institutions affect democratic representation, with a particular focus on electoral rules and party systems. In addition to serving as chair of APSA’s section on Representation and Electoral Systems, he is also a member of the executive board for the Making Electoral Democracy Work project. He has served on the editorial boards for the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and the Journal of Politics. More information can be found at his website and on his Google scholar profile.

Sona Golder

Sona N. Golder is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. She studies political institutions, with a particular interest in coalition formation. She is an editor for the British Journal of Political Science, an associate editor for Research & Politics, and serves on the editorial boards for the American Political Science Review, Political Science Research and Methods, and Comparative Political Studies. She also serves as a VIM mentor for female graduate students and junior faculty, and has served on the diversity committee for APSA’s Political Methodology Section. More information can be found at her website and on her Google scholar profile.Assistant Professor

Ben Ferland

Ben Ferland is an Assistant Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on political representation and electoral systems, with a special interest in governments/parties and public responsiveness. His research has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties, and the Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems. More information can be found on his Google scholar profile.

Graduate Students

Margaret (Molly) Ariotti

Molly is a Ph.D. candidate at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on African politics, with a particular emphasis on Francophone Africa. Her dissertation examines various aspects of the government formation process in African democracies. She has lived and worked in France, and conducted extensive field work in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso and Dakar in Senegal. In 2016, she was awarded a 2016 National Security Education Program David L. Boren Fellowship. Her work has been published in Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, and on The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. More information can be found at her website and on her Google scholar profile.

Charles Crabtree

Charles is a graduate student at the University of Michigan. His substantive research focuses on various aspects of repression and discrimination in comparative, American, and international politics. Methodologically, he is interested in research design and experiments. He has published work on these topics at the British Journal of Political Science, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Electoral Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, the Journal of Peace Research, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Political Analysis, PS: Political Science & Politics, Research & Politics, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, and in several other interdisciplinary, sociology, and psychology journals. More information can be found at his website and on his Google scholar profile.

Yaoyao Dai

Yaoyao is a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on authoritarian regimes, anti-corruption campaigns, and information manipulation (media, propaganda, and censorship), with a particular emphasis on China. She is currently conducting an online survey experiment to examine the effect of anti-corruption campaigns on regime support in China. Her research has been published in the Journal of Chinese Academy of Governance. More information can be found at her website.

Kostanca Dhima

Kostanca is a graduate student at Texas A&M. In her dissertation, Kostanca uses a series of online voting experiments to examine how electoral rules and intersectional identities (gender and race) affect substantive and descriptive representation. She also examines demand-side and supply-side explanations for women’s legislative representation in a global perspective. She has lived and worked in Albania. More information can be found at her website.

Undergraduate Students

Jennifer Heckman

Jennifer is a Schreyer Honors Scholar at Pennsylvania State University working towards a Bachelor’s degree in International Politics: National Security. She’s minoring in French Language as well as Security & Risk Analysis. Her study abroad experience includes cultural immersion visits to both France and Italy. She is currently working on a paper with Kostanca Dhima that examines women’s political representation in Africa.

Christiana (Christy) Nisbet

Christy is an undergraduate student at Pennsylvania State University working towards a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science, with minors in Anthropology and French. She interned at the Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum Archaeological Conservation Lab, Maryland during the summer of 2014 and studied in Besançon, France during the summer of 2015. Christy worked on a project on governments in African democracies with Molly Ariotti and Sona Golder as part of an independent study on Francophone Africa, and is interning with the United States Africa Command (U.S. AFRICOM) for the summer of 2016.

Links

About

The CP Group was established in 2015 and is run by Sona Golder and Matt Golder. Our research focuses on various institutional and behavioral aspects of comparative politics. The CP Group is currently home to one post-doc student, four graduate students, and two undergraduate students.